Making a Mini (Patreon)

Hey Patrons!

Yesterday I released a new episode in my GMTK Mini series - which is a series I’ve really been enjoying making. These are short and scrappy videos that I can make in a day or two - designed so that I can comment on timely events in the game design discourse.

The idea came around when God of War Ragnarok came out, and people were talking about how the NPC companions spoiled the puzzles. I wanted to talk about this and share my own view - but I didn’t really know how!

I’ve long since stopped using social media, so a tweet thread was out of the question. And if I made a full GMTK video on it… well it would take a week or two and everyone would have moved on by then. So I set myself the goal of making a short video in just one day… and that birthed this new series.

My most recent one went out yesterday, and it was about Spec Ops: The Line. I saw the news that the game had been delisted from digital stores and wanted to create a quick explainer to help people understand why this game was important. To lay out the context surrounding this game - and to show why this game is an essential part of the video game canon.

So, I thought I’d walk you through the process of making a video like this in… roughly 12 hours.

Wednesday - evening

I started on Wednesday evening (the night before release) with the research process. It’s easier to do research when you have a clear question to answer - in this case, what made Spec Ops such a big deal? I had some ideas before I began (I remember when the game came out, and saw the discourse blow up on forums and blogs back then!), but I wanted more details. So I tried to find as many interviews with the developers as possible. 

There was a GDC talk with the game’s lead writer, and the main developers gave loads of interviews at the time. For each one I would read through and save key quotes that might be useful for later. I also found a couple podcasts that might be useful. For these, I use AI to create a transcript so I can read the text - that’s much faster than listening to an hour-long chat. 

GameSpot podcast transcribed by MacWhisper

I also looked at other sources like reviews and blogs from 2012, as I wanted to get an idea of how people were talking about the game at the time. I also found an interesting book about military shooters - I sadly didn’t have time to read the whole book, but I skimmed through some important sections to pull out quotes. 

Thursday - morning

On Thursday morning I started the video process in earnest. I did a little more research - I put some videos on in the background to listen to them while I made the thumbnail for the video. I already had the thumbnail idea in my head - Walker’s face on the left, the de-listing notice from the Steam page on the right. I just had to futz with the composition and colours to get it right.

The first attempt at the thumbnail.

Next, I created a structure for the video. There were a few key things I needed to explore - what happens in Spec Ops, what the game is really about, how the game was designed in response to Call of Duty, how it was made to trick COD players, how films depict war, and so on. 

I wrote each section as a bullet point list, that I call a chunk. For example, …here’s the chunk about what most military games are like:

- spec ops is ultimately

- a response to military shooters

- call of duty, battlefield, medal of honor

- jingoistic, heroic, largely unquestioning of military and actions

- hoo-rah, american flags, humvees

- literally featuring real world guns

- startlingly realistic depictions of modern military hardware 

I can then take these chunks and move them around into different orders, until I find something I’m happy with. Something that flows nicely. And then I can find ways to segue from one to the other. 

Like how I say… “this game often feels more like Silent Hill 2 than Call of Duty. But Call of Duty is exactly what developer Yager had in mind when making this game.” That gets me from the “Spec Ops is a horror game” chunk to the “Spec Ops is a reaction to Call of Duty” chunk, in a natural way.

Next I rewrote the bullet points in a more natural prose. So that bullet point chunk above becomes…

It was ultimately a response to all the military shooters that had cropped up in the wake of 9/11, and especially after the massive success of Call of Duty 4: Modern Warfare. Games like Call of Duty, Battlefield, and Medal of Honor were almost jingoistic propaganda pieces - showing American intervention as heroic and necessary. These games turned war into a spectacular rollercoaster of set piece explosions, and depicted soldiers as mythic one-man armies. They featured startlingly realistic depictions of modern military hardware - and literally paid licenses to the companies that manufacture real-world guns.

In a normal GMTK episode, this is where I would spend significantly more time. I’d certainly spend more time on research and editing, but writing is the real time sink in a typical episode. I do so many edits and rewrites to try and convey my points clearly. But for Minis I have to take my first or second draft. It’s scary, but it’s the only way to get these things out of the door!

At this point it's just before lunch so, with the script written, I hopped into the recording booth. I have a new system for doing voice over. For each paragraph… if I make a mistake, I snap my fingers and start it again. If I get it correct, I snap my fingers twice. I can then look at the waveform of the sound file, identify the different snaps as big peaks, and use this to quickly remove all of the mistake. Then I just need to clear up the remaining audio. I can’t believe it took me 10 years to figure this out but it’s made audio processing so much faster.

Thursday - noon

After lunch, the next job is gathering footage. I’ve got a pretty huge archive now - so, for most games, I just get them off of a hard drive. I played through Spec Ops: The Line back in 2021, and then played some more for the Invisible Choices video in 2022, so I had loads of footage of the game. I wouldn’t have been able to make this as a Mini if I had to replay the entire game! I also had footage of games like Undertale and Metal Gear Solid.

But I didn’t have footage of other military shooters from before 2012, so I had to boot up Steam, download Battlefield 3, Call of Duty 4, and Medal of Honor, and grab some footage of each. Luckily they all worked - it can sometimes be a bit of a nightmare trying to play old PC games (I literally had to give up on getting The Sims 2 working on Windows 11), but these worked fine. I also finally have good internet, so downloading these games takes a matter of minutes.

This timeline is really simple - just a bunch of clips and some graphics layers for quotes and tags.

Now it’s finally into Adobe Premiere to spend the afternoon building out the video. When it’s a large video like my Mario difficulty design video - which is 30 minutes long, features dozens of games, and needs bespoke motion graphics - this is a monster task. It takes multiple days and I have to split it into chunks. But a Mini is usually around 10 minutes and doesn’t need complex editing so I can do it in a matter of hours.

I’ve built up a library of templates and whatnot, so it’s quick to do stuff like quotes and the little tags for sources. I’ve also started building a library of background music so I can just slot stuff in for videos like this. It’s not going to be my most involved video, but it should still be professional and up to the standards of the rest of the channel.

Thursday - afternoon

It’s now about 3PM, so I export and upload the video to YouTube and Nebula. While that’s going up I take the script and put it on Substack, with a few tweaks. I also write the description for the video. Once it’s uploaded to YouTube I also use the script again to generate the subtitles. 

And then… release! Phew!

It sounds quite manic, and it is. But it’s kind of fun - it’s almost like a little game jam. But for video. And just like a game jam it has loads of benefits. I can improve my video making skills, which will be useful for the longer episodes. I get to play with an idea that doesn’t always make sense in a longer form. And it can satisfy that need to make something new, super quickly!

It does feel a little… odd to release these videos. GMTK has been built on the idea of each video being a reasonably big, high quality, heavily researched “event”, and so to make something that feels slightly scrappy and rushed… well, I feel like I almost have to apologise when I put it out. But no one seems to mind, and the more of these I do, the more they will come to be expected.

And that’s good, because I really enjoy doing them. They remind me of when I first started GMTK and wasn’t bogged down in the expectations of releasing to 1.5 million subscribers - I could just make random stuff and see what worked. Plus, it’s nice to be part of “the conversation” around games. And it helps keep me in the loop while I'm working on the game.

So I’m gonna keep making them!

Thanks for reading

Mark